Monthly Archives: May 2009

What would you do if you wanted to play Dungeons & Dragons with your friends, but you knew your controlling spouse wouldn’t let you?

About ten years ago my ex-wife had the flu, and it was her practice to just kind of lie comatose when she was ill and wait for the fever to pass. I gave her an extra large dose of NyQuil so she would sleep through the night as so I could sneak out and play Dungeons & Dragons with some friends of mine. In my defense, my ex was a bit selfish of my personal time and pursuits, but that was a very low, left-handed Harold Lauder kind of move on my part. I was 22 years old at the time.

In the spirit of the gender discussion we’ve been having, the game was
hosted by a female college friendo of mine and she thought that move
was pretty awesome and gave me a fistbump (none of my friends liked my first wife).

The shameful thing is though I haven’t rolled the dice in years I
can’t say that I wouldn’t try this bunk move again, though I’d bring
my toddler with me to the game. He could play an ork or something.

First of all, did you just make an obscure Stephen King reference? That gets an awesome because I have a secret love for Stephen King novels.

Second of all, I’m glad you’re not in that relationship any more! Your ex gets a big COME ON! for not letting you play D&D with your friends.

On last Friday’s show, Luke asked chef Anthony Bourdain what is in his food Shame-ber, and boy is it glorious:

I also thought it was great that Anthony perfectly described the masthead of The Shame-ber (which is The Unknown Comic) – he said he wears a paper bag over his head when he goes into KFC to order their mac and cheese. HUNGRY FOR THE MAC AND CHEEESE!

Speaking of the masthead, I want to thank Paul for cleaning it up, and making it look more like a sketch artist drawing. RAWR!

The Shame-ber would also like to congratulate Luke Burbank on a successful first pitch at the Mariner’s game last Thursday. There was nothing shameful about that!

Finally, please don’t be shy about submitting your Shame-ber items! Say it with me: “Shame-ber.” Submissions have slowed to a trickle, and I can’t keep this blog going based on my own Shame-ber items alone. If you have submitted an item and it hasn’t appeared yet, don’t panic. I’ve got a few up my sleeve that should be posted later this week.

All the Tens had better watch their backs, because there is someone among us who is not afraid to get some secret revenge if you mess with him! This devious Ten has a long rich history of pulling terrible pranks on people with no regard to the trail of human suffering he leaves in his wake. Witness please:

1. Pouring bleach in the washing machine so when the terrible roommate he had recently kicked out of the house sneaks in to do a load, she ends up tie-dying all her clothes with horrible bleach stains.

To this day she will occasionally wear bleached clothes to work and my friend Dave will text me with photos and we share a laugh!

2. Pooping on the hoods of his enemies’ cars….. or, intending to poop on your enemy’s car, but pooping on an innocent bystander’s car accidentally!

3. Developing a serious addiction to egging personal property:

We’re not talking that I’d go egging once per month, or maybe on a random Friday with friends when we’d been drinking. We’re talking if I had a free hour I’d think, “I should go get a case.” I was seriously like an alcoholic who just couldn’t help themselves. At first I’d only go egging with my friends, but by the end I’d go egging on my free hour, lunch hour, it didn’t matter!

5. Drugging his roommate’s demon cat with a sliver of Ambien, driving the cat to a park in the middle of town, and dumping it in the hopes that it would never find its way back home. And I have to include his defense of this act:

If you knew how shitty Dave’s pet parenting skills were, you’d know that the cat is much better off having owners that actually take it to scheduled vet appointments and don’t spend its food money on weed and video games.

My boyfriend and I split up after 5 years, and it would have been amicable, except that I ended it on my terms when he wasn’t ready for us to be completely over. He was all hurt by this, so now we don’t talk at all and he thinks he needs to hold out and never talk to me again. All in all I am fine with this, but I do want to know that he still thinks about me.

He is not on Facebook, but is on Twitter. I am friends with a bunch of our mutual friends on Facebook, so I will write on their wall in the hopes of them telling my ex about them. Then I check his Twitter page to see if he thinks anything about it or will say anything (nice or mean).

This doesn’t work at all, but I am still trying. What got me started was that he did in fact talk smack about me on his Twitter once a long while ago (because I invited our mutual friends to my birthday party but not him), and a friend emailed me his page. This is when the madness began.

Otherwise, I am incredibly happy without him and am much better off. I just want to him think about me sometimes, and I know if he writes things out of anger, it is because he isn’t quite over me.

Uh, yeah…. I wouldn’t know anything about this kind of behavior. They say that living well is the best revenge, but MAN wouldn’t it feel great to know that your ex still thinks about you and has feelings for you? Then the best revenge would be to say “Too bad mofo, you sucked and my life is SO much better without you! HAHAHAHA!!” Not that I have ever wished that I could have the opportunity to say that. I am a mature adult, thank you very much.

Many people use Facebook as a way to show the world how cool and popular they are, but Patrick of Seattle has found a completely novel way to accomplish this goal:

Whenever I get I friend request, I won’t accept the request; at least not for a while. I’ll wait a week or two until I get about 5 or 6 friend requests just sitting in my inbox. After accumulating said friend requests, I will hang out with one of my friends. While with them, I will log into my Facebook, and make sure they notice the number of friend requests I have. If they say something like “Woah, that’s a lot of friend requests!” I reply nonchalantly “Oh, is that a lot for one day?” If for some reason they don’t notice, I will leave the page open and go to the bathroom in hopes they will snoop on my page and see the numerous friend requests.

I hate to break it to you Patrick, but I am guessing that Susie Burbank might have you beat when it comes to quantity of Facebook friend requests. However, you do get the evil genius award for Facebook popularity schemes.

Whitney, a Music History Ph.D. student at UW has been spending some serious study time on….

I submitted a paper abstract for a call to papers for the upcoming 2009 Twicon (Twilight conference) about the role of music in the Twilight series and the movie. I’m also writing a paper about the Quileute tribe (the tribe featured in the series) for my ethnic identity and folklore class. And I’m really excited about both! Wow.

Whitney, I could see a “Why It Matters: Twilight Edition” in your future. You should share your knowledge with the Tens!

Wade, you know – THE Maine Ten, likes to go down in his basement, pour himself a nice hot mug of cocoa and indulge in his secret shame:

Despite the fact that I’m about to graduate with my BA in English and enter into a grad program (again, in English), I occasionally go on Yahoo! Answers and spend hours at a time reading and becoming personally invested in the horrible poetry and general questions being asked by the adolescent and the elderly. These are people who can’t operate Google. And I spend valuable time in my life explaining to them (in oh-so gentle terms) how to maybe make their junk poems about their boyfriends (“your black soul stabs my heart / how could we ever be torn apart?” sort of stuff) a little less horrifying.

The sad evidence: I have 1,002 points as a Yahoo answerer, level 3. I’ve answered 160 questions, 47 of which were the “best answer.” I don’t think I get off on being pedantic, but these stats seem to indicate otherwise. Here’s perhaps the worst part of it all: There are people on that website who answer thousands of questions or tens of thousands. So it’s not like I’m even at the top of my game or anything. I’m just a terrifically average knowledge-imparter even on the painfully ignorant and slow-witted web-community that is Yahoo Answers.

I think this is kind of sweet, actually. Wade, you are doing the internet equivalent of volunteering in a homeless shelter. You wash the feet of the lame and ignorant, and for that I salute you.

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